Written and edited by Norm Scott:
EDUCATE! ORGANIZE!! MOBILIZE!!!
Three pillars of The Resistance – providing information on current ed issues, organizing activities around fighting for public education in NYC and beyond and exposing the motives behind the education deformers. We link up with bands of resisters. Nothing will change unless WE ALL GET INVOLVED IN THE STRUGGLE!

Friday, February 1, 2013

Gary Rubinstein, in NY Times Blog Today, Joins MORE Campaign

Another MORE candidate in the news. Gary Rubinstein is running on the
MORE slate for AFT/NYSUT delegate. The work he has been doing has been
outstanding and we are proud to have him join the MORE campaign.

Can the school reform movement accept constructive criticism? Gary Rubinstein hopes so. Mr. Rubinstein joined Teach for America
in 1991, the program’s second year, and has now been teaching math for
15 years, five of them in some of the nation’s neediest public schools
and 10 more at the prestigious Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. He
has a bachelor’s degree in math and a master’s in computer science,
has written two books on classroom practice and at one point helped
train new corps members for Teach for America. For years, he was a
proponent of the program, albeit one with the occasional quibble.

Then, in 2010, Mr. Rubinstein underwent a sea change. As he grew
suspicious of some of the data used to promote charter schools, be
became critical of Teach for America and the broader reform movement.
(The education scholar Diane Ravitch famously made a similar shift
around this time.)

Mr. Rubinstein, who knows how to crunch numbers, noticed that, at many
charter schools student test scores and graduation rates didn’t always
add up to what the schools claimed. He was also alarmed by what he
viewed as misguided reforms like an overreliance on crude standardized
tests that measure students’ yearly academic “growth” and teacher
performance. Mr. Rubinstein, who favors improving schools and evaluating
teachers, says using standardized test scores might seem “like a good
idea in theory.” But he also thinks the teacher ratings based on the
scores are too imprecise and subject to random variation to be a
reliable basis for high-stakes hiring and firing decisions.

Given his long alliance with Teach for America, Mr. Rubinstein knows
many of the program’s alumni who have become marquee players in school
reform. In Houston, he became friends with his fellow T.F.A. teachers
Dave Levin and Michael Feinberg, who went on to start KIPP,
the nationwide chain of charter schools. Mr. Rubinstein worked briefly
under Michelle A. Rhee before she became the chancellor of the
District of Columbia’s public schools. At another point, he met Michael
Johnston, the former charter-school principal who is now the Colorado
state senator who helped push through one of the nation’s most
aggressive testing schemes for teacher evaluations. Along the way, Mr.
Rubinstein got to know Wendy Kopp, Teach for America’s founder.

He’s now written a series of “Open Letters to Reformers I Know” on his blog, hosted by teachforus.org,
in which he shares his unease about the direction of current school
reforms. The letters are unusual, partly for their personal tone and
evident admiration of some of the recipients, and partly because
attempts at dialogue like this are increasingly rare as bitter debate
rages among educators who support charters and testing and those who
don’t.

Michael Petrilli, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution and a pro-charter education analyst with the Thomas B.
Fordham Institute, worries about this lack of exchange. He recently
conducted an analysis of Twitter and the tens of thousands of followers
of Ms. Rhee, who is pro-charter, and Ms. Ravitch, who is anti-charter,
and discovered that only 10 percent overlapped. Just as conservatives
gravitate to Fox News and liberals to MSNBC to hear their preconceived
notions and biases confirmed, Mr. Petrilli speculates that those in
education are now preaching solely to the converted, a phenomenon known
in the media world as “narrowcasting.”

Worse, in Mr. Petrilli’s view, those who follow Ms. Rhee tend to
describe themselves in their Twitter profiles as policy makers or
otherwise removed from the immediate realities of the classroom, while
Ms. Ravitch’s devotees are typically self-identified practitioners:
principals and teachers on education’s front lines. Surely these folks
should be talking to one another, but in Mr. Petrilli’s experience,
they often aren’t.

“A lot of people in the reform community say, ‘We know what we need to
do; we just need the political will to do it,’ and I think that’s
wrong,” he says. “We need to be much more humble. We’re now in a
position where a lot of reforms are being enacted; they’re playing out
in the real world, and it’s crazy not to listen to teachers, to the
problems that might need to be addressed.”

Mr. Petrilli’s wisdom derives from hard experience: “I went through
this with No Child Left Behind,” he says. “We put so much effort into
cheerleading and making the case for it, we didn’t address the
inevitable problems.” Mr. Petrilli now recognizes that the law might
have been stronger and worked better had its supporters been more open
to input and constructive criticism from the start.

Perhaps proving Mr. Petrilli’s point, only two of the eight recipients
of Mr. Rubinstein’s “Open Letters” — Mr. Johnston and Ms. Kopp — have
replied so far (although a third, Jon Schnur, a former presidential
education policy adviser and the executive chairman of America
Achieves, had already promised to do so before being contacted for this
article and says he still will). However, Mr. Johnston chose not to
publicly answer some of Mr. Rubinstein’s more pointed criticisms. For
example, Mr. Johnston has stated that the alternative school he helped
establish and where he was a principal “made Colorado history by
becoming the first public high school in which 100 percent of seniors
were admitted to four-year colleges.”

As Mr. Rubinstein notes, the claim is technically accurate but
misleading because the school also had very high attrition rates before
its students graduated. This is the kind of data distortion Mr.
Rubinstein disparages: “There were actually 73 10th graders,” Mr.
Rubinstein writes, “who had dwindled to 44 seniors — a pretty relevant
detail.” The school apparently couldn’t meet the needs of a good
proportion of its original students. Many of those who left presumably
ended up back in traditional public schools, which often become the
dumping grounds for students whom charters can’t, or won’t, teach and
then are solely blamed for these students’ failure.

Still, Mr. Rubinstein concedes that even 44 graduates out of 73, in
many low-income communities, amounts to “a story about kids beating the
odds.” But why the need to exaggerate the sales pitch instead of
acknowledging the more complex, challenging picture?

At the heart of all Mr. Rubinstein’s “Open Letters” is a plea to his
old friends and colleagues, many of whom long ago left the classroom,
to remember just how hard teaching is and to remain honest and
transparent about what they have and haven’t accomplished, not only to
keep faith with those teachers and principals entrusted with the tough
job of implementing reforms but also so we can know what truly works
and doesn’t and why, in order to build on real, not imagined, gains.

For those who wish to be part of the solution, Mr. Petrilli advises
more genuine dialogue: listening to those whose views one opposes and
“staying open to the possibility,” he writes, “that they might,
nevertheless, have a few smart things to say.”

One interesting
point Gary concedes below that I disagree with is that 44 out of 73 is
not spectacular. Even in the school I taught at we had a decent
percentage of graduates --- most of my top classes graduated from high
school and many went on to college. It was the ones that are similar to
the group pushed out or left - the 29 out of 73 that are similar to
our struggling students -- and in fact this school probably had a higher
level of motivated students to start with.

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